I realise (/think?) that CPUs essentially treat two different voltages as a 1 or 0, but what stops us from using 3 or more different voltages? Wouldn’t that exponentially increase the CPU’s throughput by allowing for decisions with greater than two outcomes to be calculated in one cycle? This would presumably mean that a LOT of stuff written for base 2 would need to be updated to base 3 (in this example), but I can’t imagine that’s the only reason we haven’t done this.
I feel like I’ve explained that poorly, but hopefully you get the gist.
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someone else will probably have a clearer answer, but computers are made with transistors which are tiny semiconductors, they conduct electricity. and the way they work is by having two states either on or off kind of like a lamp, and those two states can be handled in binary, if we were to use other number bases there will be more states which don’t exist unless you go to quantum computing.
you can think of stop lights, you have red, yellow and green to handle how traffic goes, in transistors we only have green and red (on and off)
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